Re: [gentoo-dev] Issues regarding glep-55 (Was: [gentoo-council] Re: Preliminary Meeting-Topics for 12 February 2009)

[Jim Ramsay]

Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com> wrote:
> People are struggling with the one level scheme we have now. We're
> already having to produce fancy tables and summaries for new EAPIs
> because people can't keep track of when features came along. Two
> levels just means no-one will remember any of it.

I disagree with your assertion that people are struggling - I think
things are very nicely documented in PMS and the devmanual, which are
where all EAPI changes should be documented in the future, regardless
if you specify the EAPI in the file, the extension, or both.

Two levels really just means that any fancy tables will have to have
one extra row (or perhaps a series of fancy tables) and any summaries
will have to have an extra section added whenever a new filename
extension becomes necessary.

> For the package manager, it's just a bit of added mess, not any major
> difficulty.

This is good to know, thank you for the clarification.

> People are opposed to 55 because of a knee-jerk reaction against
> changing file extensions and against doing anything that comes from
> the great Satan and all his little minions... If you're going to throw
> an equivalent but supposedly compromising solution at people, go for
> '.eapi3.eb' instead.

I can't speak to anyone's motivations or religious beliefs other than my
own here, but the opposition I have heard most often in this thread
is something like: "I don't like it when the file extension changes so
often". Some people site historical president or the way other software
does things, or whatever -> doesn't really matter.

What does matter is that some people don't like it when the file
extension changes very often. I think my solution is a valid compromise
because it balances, in my opinion, the two camps, whose arguments I
summarize as:

glep-55'ers: "I don't care if the file extension changes all the time, I
just want a solution that works and is reasonably future-proof"

Anti-55'ers: "I don't want the file extension to change ever, but I
would agree that for major-enough changes it may be required
sometimes"

If I understand the '.eapi3.eb' to which you make passing reference,
this is just a fancy hand-wavy way to say "Look, the true .eb
extension won't ever change, just the .eapi3 part which isn't
technically the extension..." which isn't a compromise at all - It's an
attempt to (cleverly?) obfuscate where in the filename the EAPI is
stored.

-- 
Jim Ramsay
Gentoo Developer (rox/fluxbox/gkrellm)